# Chapter 6. All About Your Desktop

"Grandma, what big eyes you have" (Little Red Hood)

"The better to see you" (The wolf)

The more you see, the more efficiently you can use your desktop. KDE gives you the opportunity to make the desktop look and work the you way prefer, enabling you to work faster and more productively. It even gives you the opportunity to be warned if a wolf is trying to eat you, or (if you happen to be a granny) alert you when Little Red Hood is on her way to bring you the goodies. Now that's service.

# 6.1. The Autostart Folder

Before I discovered the Autostart folder, my daily startup routine with KDE consisted of the following: Start KDE, start KEdit, start kvt, start Netscape, and start kscd. This took time I could have spent better. As of the first Beta release, native KDE programs left open at the end of a session will save their state and reappear when you login again, but there are some programs (like Netscape) that will not. You can use the Autostart folder for these programs.

To launch programs when KDE is started, do the following:

1. Open the Autostart folder. You can find it on the upper left corner of you desktop.

2. Open a filemanager window containing the program you want to add. If you do not know how to do this, see the section describing kfm, the K Filemanager.

3. Drag and Drop the desired program from its source folder into the Autostart folder. When asked, choose Link to create a symbolic link instead of a full copy. This saves a great deal of disk space.

4. Repeat this step for every program you want started when KDE is launched. Of course, you may select applications not native to KDE, including Netscape, tin, pine and many others.

5. Restart KDE.

Your programs should now launch automatically when KDE restarted. If you want to add something special (e.g., you want to see a certain web site when your system goes up), read Using templates. The procedures described there works for any folder, so you can also apply them to the Autostart folder, as well.